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Thiels most profound thinking is about the future. He argues that we have come to collectively assume that the future unfolds according to a random process for which we have no control. Visions of a different and better future have been replaced by a mix of complacency and lowered expectations.

His book is a treatise on how to get back to the future. Its a powerful case that we arent just passive observers of the future but rather that we have agency over the kind of economy and society that we want. We can author a different and better future.

As we slowly come out of the pandemic, Thiels insights are more important than ever. Zero to One is a guide to a post-pandemic vision of growth, dynamism and opportunity.

Sean Speer

The fastidious Mr. Perelman.

I could recommend one of his books, but there is no need. They are all superb. S.J. Perelman was among the most gifted masters of English prose, and with Flann OBrien, the finest short-piece writer of the past century. He wrote mainly for magazines, mostly for The New Yorker in the days when it might have claimed to have been a venue for stuff really worth reading, and in an era that had time for craft and style even in venues presumed to be evanescent.

S.J. Perelman was a writer for a class of writing which I will call high-prose comedy. He sought the perfection of phrase as musicians seek absolute melody, parody his chosen field of operations, and perfection of the sentence, in diction, flow and ornament, his always attendant ambition. He owned an instinct for perfect cadence, and had in his lexical quiver the most brilliant, far-reaching, and inventive vocabulary of any man or woman who ever wrote for a magazine. His gift for mockery of the pedestrian, the bloated, the pretentious, was nonpareil.

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Have you read any good books lately? - National Post